Shining a spotlight on legacy giving

Six out of ten RNLI launches are only possible thanks to legacy donations and charitable bequests, so promoting legacies is integral to our fundraising activity. Adding our voice to the campaign Last year, the RNLI was keen to add its voice to the promotion of Remember A Charity Week, as we know the whole sector stands to benefit from raised awareness of legacy giving. We fully support the aim to increase the percentage of Wills with a charitable gift. Just a 4% increase would generate £1 billion in additional income for charities, so we felt it was important to play our part in the campaign. Collective aims  The decision to leave a gift to charity in your Will is not a quick one and many may consider it for some time before taking action; we try to inform supporters about this way of supporting the RNLI throughout the year. Remember A Charity helps us to shine a spotlight on legacy giving. Their work with the government, legal industry and strategic partners helps create a collective voice for its members and raise awareness of legacy giving on our behalf. Living Legends In order to showcase supporters who do extraordinary things for our charity, during last year’s Remember A Charity Week, we delivered a social media campaign to celebrate our ‘Living Legends’. Inspiring supporters including a shark-diving, tank-driving grandmother (pictured above), fundraising for the RNLI while completing daredevil acts, helped us reach over 50,000 people on Facebook. Stories like these helped us to capture the attention of the public and engage people in legacies. Creating a buzz We promoted Remember A Charity Week to staff by displaying posters in the office and in lifeboat stations, putting Remember A Charity chocolates on everyone’s desks, sending bookmarks to our shops and we also ‘premiered’ the campaign film. This created a real buzz and gave staff and volunteers a reason to talk about legacy giving to supporters. The Living Legend theme was so successful we plan to develop it year-on-year. Find out more about the RNLI here. Clare McCulloch, Product Marketing Manager (Legacy and In Memory Giving) at the RNLI